Horace Mann: “It may be inconvenient for a Texan claimant to prove his right to an alleged fugitive in Massachusetts; but it will be…”

I answer, that this difference which they so be-little and disparage will often be all the difference between freedom and bondage, between life and death, between honor and infamy, between happiness and perdition.

The kidnapper, Alberti, now lies in a Pennsylvania prison for carrying away a mother and her child; but the mother and the child are now groaning under the lash of a southern taskmaster.

These are but specimens of what the Fugitive Slave law has already done, before the public mind has become familiarized with its brutalities, and while there is yet some sensibility to the claims of justice and mercy left among us.

Let me read to you the disparaging and contemptuous remark of the address on that great palladium of human liberty, the trial by jury.